Without fossil fuels, or some form of alternative energy that can be scaled up to the consumption level of fossil fuels, these non-adaptive social systems will collapse, and all the ferocity of tribal competitiveness, which they had been holding in abeyance, will appear.

In his essay about laughter, he continues to show how humor, if understood by both parties involved, can demonstrate our own non-adaptive behaviors and, through a mild form of humiliation, lead to a correction or genuine improvement in relationship.

The answer that Lynch would give would involve an expansion of “junk” genome size for non-adaptive reasons, coupled with an exploitation of that genetic-environmental resource by the adaptive, non-junk portion of the genome.

These in turn have either the chance of being transformed into “naptonuons,” that is, dissipate their non-adaptive former information without acquiring new functions, or else into “xaptonuons,” that is, elements adapted to a new function (Brosius and Gould 1993).